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The couple’s 1980 book, ‘‘Free to Choose,’’ demonstrated how the government can undermine economic prosperity and concluded inflation can be produced only by rapid growth in the money supply. In a 2003 speech, Ben S. Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, said ‘‘one can hardly overstate’’ the couple’s influence on policy. Their efforts played a role in decisions that ranged from severing the dollar’s peg to gold in the 1970s to ending the military draft, according to economic historian and Carnegie Mellon University professor Allan H. Meltzer. They conceived or improved upon numerous ideas that remain central to public-policy debates, including using vouchers to help parents select the schools their children attend, legalizing drugs and privatizing Social Security.

Our central theme in public advocacy has been the promotion of human freedom….it underlies our opposition to rent control and general wage and price controls, our support for educational choice, privatizing radio and television channels, an all-volunteer army, limitation of government spending, legalization of drugs, privatizing Social Security, free trade, and the deregulation of industry and private life to the fullest extent possible.

The story began Monday morning when Daniela and her stepmother, Marisa Earnest, set up shop at Cartmill Avenue and Hillman Street in north Tulare. The lemonade was freshly squeezed and priced at $2 for a 32-ounce plastic cup.
Richard Garcia, a Tulare code enforcement officer, happened to be at the same intersection to remove illegal signs left behind by someone selling tetherball poles.
Garcia told Daniela and her stepmother that their lemonade stand — on the northwest corner of the busy intersection — was not safe, and also that they needed a business license to sell lemonade.
He helped the pair load their ice chest and equipment into their car and then called city planners to find out where they could relocate.(…)
Vice Mayor Philip Vandegrift said a compromise — possibly asking lemonade stand operators to pay a nominal fee or establishing a license fee waiver for children under a certain age — could be the outcome of Daniela’s experience.

Judges could be forced to bow to Sharia law in some divorce cases heard in Britain.
An EU plan calls for family courts across Europe to hear cases using the laws of whichever country the couple involved have close links to.
That could mean a court in England handling a case within the French legal framework, or even applying the laws of Saudi Arabia to a husband and wife living in Britain.

Enough. In a word, that is the message of disgusted taxpayers fed up with the confiscatory policies of both parties in Washington. George Bush pre-socialized the economy with billion-dollar bailouts of the financial and auto industries. Barack Obama is pouring billions more down those sinkholes. It isn’t just the camel’s back that’s broken. His neck and four legs have all snapped, too.

Enough. Last Friday, thousands of Americans turned out to protest reckless government spending in the pork-laden stimulus package, the earmark-clogged budget bill, the massive mortgage-entitlement program and taxpayer-funded corporate rescues. Contrary to false left-wing blog smears that the hastily planned impromptu events were “Astro-turfed,” the crowds were packed with first-time grassroots activists. They were people with families and day jobs whose usual definition of “community organizing” involves neighborhood yard sales or their kids’ soccer matches. They were members of the silent majority who decided to be silent no more

Suspected militant recruiter Samira Jassim reportedly calls herself “the Mother of Believers”.
Detained in January by Iraqi security forces, the mother of six is accused of converting dozens of vulnerable women into suicide attackers. In an apparent video confession, the middle-aged woman described how she identified potential bombers, helped supply them with explosives and led them to their targets.
She also explained, in a separate interview with the Associated Press, how insurgents used rape as a tool, with the “shamed” women persuaded to redeem themselves through suicide attacks. Her apparent confession could help throw light on the recent increase in attacks in Iraq involving female bombers.

The widely publicized study headed by Burnham contended that nearly 655,000 Iraqis had died because of the U.S.-led invasion and war in Iraq. “When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused,” the council said in a statement. It noted that the group’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices calls for researchers to disclose their methodology when survey findings are made public so they can be independently evaluated and verified.
“Dr. Burnham provided only partial information and explicitly refused to provide complete information about the basic elements of his research,” said Mary Losch, chair of the association’s Standards Committee. The group made no judgment on whether Burnham’s findings were accurate but said his refusal to fully cooperate with the probe “violates the fundamental standards of science, seriously undermines open public debate on critical issues and undermines the credibility of all survey and public opinion research.”

Amid Barack Obama’s inauguration as US president, the war on Gaza and the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan’s media had until recently all but ignored the descent into hell of the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province.
The valley has been transformed from a tourism magnet because of its alpine scenery into a valley stained with blood in recent months. From banning female education and blowing up schools to the hanging of decapitated bodies in Mingora, the valley’s main town, the reign of terror spearheaded by Maulana Fazalullah, a radical cleric, defies description.

I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate. Only ten per cent of the “stimulus” to be spent on 2009. Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.
This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.

A controversial new biopic about Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is awakening old passions and provoking vigorous defenses and denunciations of the iconic revolutionary and – in the case of an interview with The Washington Times – a dramatic walkout.
“I’m getting uncomfortable,” Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie’s portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. “I’m done. I’m done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.” With that, the Oscar-winning actor walked away, abruptly terminating an interview conducted late last week to discuss director Steven Soderbergh’s “Che.”

In one classroom Saturday, when UNRWA schools reopened, a Palestinian teacher was filmed asking children about their trauma during the war. The unidentified teacher then told the children that Palestinians have to “wage war against them (Israelis) until they leave their land,” and asked her students, aged about 8, how they should react.
Two children in the class suggested hurling stones or rockets back at Israel. “Okay,” the teacher said, apparently summing up her class’ position. “We throw rockets at them, we throw stones at them,” she said.
Ging said such behavior is “completely unacceptable,” and will be “dealt with in the most severest of fashions.” He said the teacher would likely be removed once identified. Teachers have been fired from UNRWA in the past for incitement.

Behind the housing boom and bust was one of those alluring but undefined phrases that are so popular in politics– “affordable housing.” It is hard for me to know specifically what politicians are talking about when they use this phrase. But then politics is about evoking emotions, not examining specifics. (…)
If you think it through, that is a policy for disaster. We cannot all go around buying whatever we want, whether or not we have enough money to afford it, and have somebody else make up the difference. For society as a whole, there is no somebody else. But of course political slogans are not meant to be thought through, are they? They are often an emotional substitute for thinking at all.
(…) Continuar a ler →

Say, these anti-Semites are awfully clever. They were smart enough not to be white skinheads. Because they’re Muslims immigrants, they’re allowed to do what 150 white skinheads in a Jewish neighbourhood wouldn’t be allowed to do. They’re allowed to taunt and spit at Jews, and hurl shoes at Israel supporters, have placards with swastikas, and trespass with impunity. And they get their own tax-paid bodyguards — Calgary Police Service cops threatening any of their political foes with arrest.
Try doing any of that if you’re a white neo-Nazi with a shaved head.

CARACAS: President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by falling oil prices that threaten to damage his efforts to establish a Socialist-inspired state, is quietly courting Western oil companies once again.

Until recently, Chávez had pushed foreign oil companies here into a corner by nationalizing their oil fields, raiding their offices with tax authorities and imposing a series of royalties increases.

But faced with the plunge in prices and a decline in domestic production, senior officials here have begun soliciting bids from some of the largest Western oil companies in recent weeks — including Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and Total of France — promising them access to some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, according to energy executives and industry consultants here.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.